The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [144]
KEY BEER
In search of the perfect proprietary ale, Peters traveled to Van Steenberge, the last brewery in the Meetjesland (East Flanders) region of Belgium, where Monk’s Café Flemish Sour, his superb, ruddy-red house beer, would be born. At 5.5% ABV it’s a Flemish Oud Bruin–style ale, aged in oak and fabulously complex, with wild but pleasing blasts of leather, tart fruit, and woody tannins. “I told [Van Steenberg’s brewers] the basic parameters I was looking for. I wanted a sour beer with not much sweetness. I wanted a relatively light body, with low to moderate alcohol, a thirst quencher in the summertime,” says Peters. He got it. You should, too.
DETOUR
THE MONK’S CAFÉ’S
TOM PETERS
In the early 1980s, during the protoplasmic days of Belgian beer appreciation (Merchant du Vin and Vanberg Dewulf had only started bringing in their specialties in 1978, and then only in bottles), Tom Peters began converting one local drinker at a time to Belgian ales. One fateful evening at a bar called Café Nola on South Street, Peters promised a couple of patrons he’d pay for a bottle of Chimay Grand Reserve out of his own pocket if they didn’t like it. He’d tried the delicious, tawny brown ale at the recommendation of a barman in Brussels in 1984, and, electrified by its flavors, worked on getting it into his bar, despite the owner’s concerns that the brew would fizzle. By the end of the first night he’d sold the whole box, and though he’d failed to keep one for himself (“I’ll never make that mistake again,” he quipped) a movement was born. Eventually Peters would help bring in a number of Belgian specialties to the United States for the first time ever in kegs, including such iconic brews as Kwak, Houblon Chouffe, Lindeman’s, and Corsendonk. When a craft beer lover goes into a bar and sees native Belgian beers actually on tap, Peters is the man to toast.
Peters wasn’t always obvious craft beer material, as it were. A dedicated long-distance runner and drummer, he first tried the law, then military life. By the time Philly beer culture came alive in the late 1980s and 1990s—Stoudt’s, Penn Brewing, and Dock Street were all ramping up production, as was Home Sweet Homebrew, an incubator of later talents like Bill Covaleski of Victory—Peters was making plans for Monk’s, which he opened with his friend and business partner Fergus Carey in 1997. A couple of years before he’d brought in a pallet of Kwak beer kegs to a bar called Copa Too!, his next managing gig after Café Nola and they’d sold like hotcakes. The vision for Monk’s was vividly apparent. Today their bar sells vast quantities of Belgian beer, and his cellar is easily one of the biggest repositories of rare Belgian ales anywhere in the world. In 2004, he was made a Knight of Honor in Chevalier du Fourquet des Brasseurs, the 400-year old Belgian brewers’ guild, in Brussels, and one of the only Ambassadeurs d’Orval in the United States, an honor extended by the famed Belgian Trappist brewery.
Philly, with its blue-collar roots and deep beer history, was the perfect town for Peters to help cultivate the Belgian ale craze, which continues unabated. “The beer culture runs really deep for the whole country, but I think it runs deeper in Philadelphia than anywhere else,” says Peters. “There’s no other city in the world that has the current beer culture we have here. You can go to any restaurant, new or established. Or to the Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park, and you can find good beer at almost every stand.” Today he marvels at the new generation of beer drinkers and brewers who started with unusual craft